No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.
“stealing” a digital copy of a movie, tv show or a game is like if the item you’re stealing from a store is infinitely copyable. Like the replicator from star trek…or that one episode of Sabrina the teenage witch with that box that can make a perfect copy of everything you put inside of it.
Of course I personally would never pirate anything, no matter how much streaming services increase their prices or how much they crack down on VPN usage to get around geo-restrictions, PIRACY IS BAD AND ONLY BAD PEOPLE DO IT.
I’ve never pirated anything in my whole life!
I don’t pirate for moral purposes. I pirate because:
I do not have all of the money in the world to simply just spend luxuriously on anything I set my sights on.
I care about having food, a place to stay I can call my own, and a vehicle I need to get to places.
There were stretches in time in my life where I had been broke and too poor while many things have passed me by that I have pirated since.
I find that some services or media just aren’t worth the asking price or the value of what’s there that’s offered, because it does not pique my interest that would make me want to subscribe.
I live a finite lifespan, I do not have all of the time in the world until legal alternatives are available or for some things to be affordable when I know it is likely that they won’t be.
It’s really that simple.
I’m not going to say piracy is right or wrong.
What I will say is if everyone had access to that replicator, and everyone replicated everything in the store and left, the store would close down, and the products would stop being made.
Likewise, piracy is only viable because not everyone does it. If literally every person pirated the games or movies of any given company, that company would no longer be profitable and would close down.
Piracy is getting something for free because other people pay for it.
Except there are people who buy something AND want to have offline backup copies of it.
Of course. When people need to save money and have to consider what expense to cut away. People need something to tend to.
They promised they would go out of business if I pirated their content, and that was a lie.
And of course, they did go out of business. That’s why they need welfare from the government now.
You should never pirate anything, that would be bad.
There are people who understand what I’m saying, and then there’s the idiots that downvoted me on some of the comments I posted
And yet you can borrow anything from the local library for free and its considered totally fine and not pirating.
If “buying” is not owning, then “piracy” is not stealing.
Why do you have to take a moral stance?
Do it because it’s cool
Private property is theft piracy in all forms is morally exceptable. DMCA actively harms progress, and this isn’t some techbro take as I disagree with AI.
my view on it lies in two seperate buckets:
- if the thing being pirated is vastly overpriced for its function i don’t see it as immoral
- if the thing being pirated is no longer available or was never made available for private ownership, ie only able to be streamed and only available on said service so long as the host streamer still has rights to do so, it isn’t immoral.
and just to be clear, i don’t see piracy as inherently evil or anticapitalistic. there have been several books and apps that i pirated that i liked and converted to an actual buyer to get more books in the series or get updates to the program.
It is always morally acceptable to pirate things
made by giant corporationsFixed it for you.
I’d make a point saying that there’s a personal moral and a broader societal understanding of morality, and they don’t always align.
That’s a fair point.
There is no “stealing from corporations”
It’s as easy as that
I mean, the replicator is making food out of SOMETHING. I’m guessing it’s some kind of waste produce from the engine room. It needs matter to operate. It can’t create ex-nihilo.
The replicator from Star Trek makes matter out of pure energy, not out of other matter. It can make almost anything out of matter, so long as it has the molecular pattern on file, and the ship has enough energy available to power the replicators. That energy comes primarily from energy storage dedicated to replicator production, but in emergencies where a massive amount of matter need fabricated, additional power can be provided by the warp core.
So they’re using several hiroshima’s or nagasaki’s worth of nuclear bomb’s energy to produce a cup of Earl Gray, hot? Seems like using garbage or human waste would save a lot of energy?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the power required to produce a small amount of matter?
While we’re at it, is a transporter actually transporting me? Or is it technically really replicating me?
Because what I assumed was happening was they essentially had a transporter like device that would take some matter (say a big pile of human dung) transport it (i.e, convert it into the energy the transporter uses run it through a pattern buffer that’s stored in the transporter for say, Earl Gray hot) and beam it into the Captain’s quarters as Earl Gray hot instead of poop.
A cup of tea is around 500megatons if you convert all the matter into energy. We’re talking a few thousand Hiroshimas.
It is always morally acceptable?
Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.
I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.
Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.
But if not a lot of sales are made, they won’t work with the same people again and will play more safely, and we’ll get less diversity
But maybe the people who were working in big studio movies would shift to independent film making with lower budgets and more diversity.
Obviously it’s also not a good solution, but do we need the big studios to make yet another avengers or minions?
If they keep raising my food subscription I’m gonna start pirating from supermarkets too
Piracy is a response to various kinds of market failure, inequality.
Big agree, also now I want to rewatch Sabrina the Teenage Witch lol
